What Can the 18th Century Teach Us About Working Motherhood?

I am a scholar of the 18th century and a working mother. This unique combination of roles inspired my most recent book, Laboring Women: Reproducing Women and Work in the Eighteenth Century (University of Virginia Press, 2023).

While conducting my research, I was consistently struck by the parallels that exist between 18th-century mothers and the mother-workers of today, especially as they relate to the competing priorities of working outside the home and raising a family.

Although the notion of “work-life balance” did not exist in the 18th century, my book’s afterword discusses provocative examples of how 21st-century working mothers respond to the pressures of an idealized form of motherhood in ways that closely resemble the efforts of their 18th-century sisters. It also explores how society punishes marginalized women who fail to live up to the ideal of the “supermom.”

In describing their experiences, the afterword draws a through line between the Enlightenment overvaluation of the cult of motherhood[i] and today’s pressure for women to do and to have it all, encouraging readers to make connections that explain how our past representations of motherhood shape our current struggles in parenting.

When I reference the “supermom” of today, I’m referring to the woman who is successful at managing both her career and her home, all while making it look easy and flawless. Part of the supermom’s credo is to engage in hypervigilance, yet the perceived need-intensive mothering tends to occur at the same time in the life cycle when women are ramping up their careers, creating a veritable pressure cooker.

My book’s afterword offers some tantalizingly brief examples of how 21st-century women are coping with what I call “the cult of motherhood 2.0,” that is, an old set of unattainable maternal expectations that have their roots in Enlightenment constructs. For example, I discuss how celebrity mom Jennifer Lopez took a page out the playbook of the 18th century’s most famous actress, Sarah Siddons, when she brought her daughter on tour with her.

As Laboring Mothers renders clear, the degree to which women can manage the so-called work-life balance largely depends on privilege based on class, race, sexual orientation, and gender identity, among other factors. I also hope to leave my reader with a sense of the great economic and cultural contributions women from all walks of life have made by documenting how women have always contributed meaningfully to industries, all while raising the next generation of people.

[i] Coined by scholar Felicity Nussbaum, “the cult of motherhood” refers to how middle-class English women were encouraged to limit themselves to a type of maternal domesticity seen as essential to nation and empire building. See Felicity Nussbaum, “ʻSavage’ Mothers: Narratives of Maternity in the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Cultural Critique 20 (1991): 123-51.